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3 Comments

Micro-enterprise in one week

Hey - I've got my son with me for a week of "work experience" at home! Rather than watch me video conferencing and tapping at the keyboard, we're going to attempt to construct a micro-enterprise in one week from Idea to Customer. You can follow our project @stage3 (awaiting a real name) PHOTALITARIAN.

Have you done anything like this? Any hints or tips?

Our idea is a quick-and-easy site to create and order a photo product (should be doable in a week as I already have some experience with print products).

Question: For $14.95 delivered, would you buy:
A: 24+ page pocket book of your best photos (A6)
B: 24 fun photo stickers to stick everywhere (6cm)
C: 9 clingy photo magnets for your fridge or car or grandma (5cm)
D: none of the above (eurgh)

Bonus points: why or why not?

UPDATE DAY 2

Thanks all for your input - moving onto Day 2 - we've decided to concentrate on pocket-sized photo-books under our new name....

.. wait for it. ...

... drum roll ...

https://photalitarian.com

I still have trouble spelling it right. It's live now as we work on it. Have a go, let us know! (it's not too exciting yet...)

UPDATE DAY 3

Well, we've managed to scrape together some borrowed components to make a basic book photo selector and preview and almost checkout. You can just about buy a book but not quite - need to sort out the Stripe integration! You can try it live! The invisible back end of actually constructing and printing the book are still conceptual.

UPDATE DAY 4

Stripe is integrated and the big news is that you can actually buy a book now! It's still a bit rough around the edges and we're smoothing them over now - improved book editor, preview and purchase experiences!

on December 16, 2019
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    I would choose option A.

    I like projects with hard/quick deadlines. Helps to stay focused and ship something by the end. Little time to overthink. And remember you can always tweak and make better after launch.

  2. 1

    A time limit like this is an awesome way to ensure you build something useful! The constraint will likely help you accomplish more shipped product in a week than you could in much more time.

    I've done very rapid launches of my own and helped a couple of clients go from zero to launch in a week. You can absolutely get revenue this week. Based on my experiences, a few thoughts:

    • Realize that what you ship by EOW may be a much lower quality of work than you're used to. "Quality" here doesn't mean it doesn't work, it means it won't have all the bells and whistles. What gets cut is obviously project-specific; in this case, design might rate higher than some features. With a week as your timeline, you will likely only have time to do the very basic of everything. Cut everything you can.
    • Break tasks down to a fixed number of hours. Treat each task as a test: pencils down at the end of the allotted time. No excuses.
    • It's fine to leave room for manual processes. For example, fulfillment can be 100% manual to start.
    • Don't underestimate the amount of work required to launch. Building the product is just one item out of many you will need to launch.
    • Seriously, cut more from your plan. Make a "Week 2" bucket in your Trello/Basecamp/etc. and move the cut stuff there.
    • It's worth it to develop a buyer persona and reason they will buy at the very beginning. This will drive a lot of decisions as you move through the week.
    • The 7-Day Startup is a quick read and lays out a plan for doing exactly this. You don't have time to read it this week, but you could look at the section headers to develop an attack plan.
    • Use every shortcut. Design templates, all the OSS you can. Buy pieces if you are able and it would help. Once you prove that you can generate revenue, you can fix all this.
    • Cut more from your plan, you can add it next week.

    Of your options, I would be most prone to C. I'm not into stickers, and photo books mostly sit on the shelf. It might be interesting if I could pay more for larger-format photos delivered as really high-quality posters (even better if you frame it).

    Good luck!

    1. 1

      Awesome thanks Nako.

      This is our line of thinking too: cut cut cut to the bare minimum and then leverage other people's work wherever we can. Luckily we can draw on the PixxiBook experience and infrastructure to some degree which I hope will give us an advantage.

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